The full tower PC from my previous video still had the leaking Varta battery issue, so I went ahead and dealt with that first. I checked the charging voltage at the battery terminals with the machine running and found 4.8 volts, which ruled out using a rechargeable LIR2032 directly. Instead I cleaned up the old battery area, removed the remaining metal, and installed a CR2032 holder with a diode on the positive side to block the board’s charging circuit.
That repair took a little fiddling because the holder lined up with the original holes, but the added diode changed the fit. I re-bent the diode so the battery would sit properly and still be removable, even though it ended up close to a screw hole. Once everything was back together, the machine powered up normally, and after sitting for over an hour it kept the BIOS settings instead of losing them again.
I also went back and tested the 5.25-inch floppy drive, which I had skipped earlier. I cleaned it with a new old stock Memorex cleaning kit from 1990, then tried a disk and got some ugly noises and read problems. The drive was a 1.2MB unit, and the trouble cleared up once I switched over to proper high-density disks instead of the double-density ones I had first tried. After that, the drive formatted and passed its tests.
There was also a quick Penny Cam break, then I checked the CD-ROM controller card. I wanted to know whether the RCA jacks on the back actually carried audio, so I connected speakers and tried a music CD. At first I got nothing, but after moving the internal audio connection over to the controller card, CD audio came through those rear jacks just fine.
For DOS gaming, I ran into the usual conventional memory problem right away. Lands of Lore refused to start with the normal hard drive boot, so I used Phil’s Computer Lab DOS starter setup from a floppy instead of installing it to the hard drive. Because this machine used Ontrack, I had to hit space at the right time so it could still see the C drive while booting from A. With that in place, I got the usual menu of memory configurations and was able to launch the games with sound and speech working.
I also set up file transfers over the network using the machine’s Ethernet card and an IOGear wireless adapter. That let the PC join my existing Wi-Fi network without needing a long cable across the garage. On the Windows 95 side, I connected to a Samba share after enabling the older protocols needed for it, and once that was configured I could move files over cleanly.
The other big project was a Raspberry Pi MIDI device based on MT32-Pi and the ClumsyMIDI board. I assembled the board, noted the required jumper settings on the DAC board, and loaded the MT-32 ROM files so it would boot properly. Once connected to the Sound Blaster’s MIDI breakout cable, the Pi came up on its little display and started responding to MIDI playback.
I compared Sound Blaster audio against the MT-32 emulation in Lands of Lore, Dune, and Civilization. The full tower ended up with a working CMOS battery fix, a working 5.25-inch drive, working CD audio output on the controller card, Wi-Fi file transfer to Windows 95, and a Raspberry Pi MIDI setup that sounded great in DOS games.
— Aaron
Links
- IOGear Wireless Adapter
- Phil’s Computer Lab Disk
- MT32-Pi Project
- ClumsyMidi Project
- Samba Settings for Win95
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
00:52 – Fixing The CMOS Battery
07:53 – Testing The 5.25 Floppy Drive
13:48 – Penny Cam!
14:10 – Testing The CDROM Controller
16:30 – DOS Games Startup Disk
23:09 – Transferring Files
26:40 – Building The MIDI Device
30:10 – Comparing MIDI DOS Games
34:39 – Lands Of Lore
37:32 – Dune
40:46 – Civilization
42:58 – Wrap Up